Tales of Hollywood

Unsecret agent

THE LAST MOGUL: LEW WASSERMAN, MCA AND THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF HOLLYWOOD.

By Dennis McDougal.

Crown; 560 pages; $27.50

NOW that management consultants are commoner in Hollywood than mobsters, the town is a drearier place. Real glamour needs a dark side. That is part of the fascination of Dennis McDougal's wonderful book: for around 40 years, MCA was the dark side of Hollywood.

American journalism these days has to be about personalities; so this book is ostensibly the biography of Lew Wasserman, who is now 85, and ran MCA for most of the post-war period. But Mr Wasserman did not have his own personality. He was MCA man, in his uniform black suit, white shirt and thin black tie. The book is really about MCA, the agency that once owned most of the talent in Hollywood—and thus it is a book about power, glamour, corruption, and the relationship between them.

MCA's control over talent had the same effect as if one oil company controlled most of the world's output of crude: it got to control most of the downstream operations as well. So, for instance, when a young actor called Tony Randall, who wasn't an MCA client, got a part which Dean Martin, who was an MCA client, wanted, the agency rolled into action. The studio was told that if it did not replace Randall with Martin, two of the movie's other stars, Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift, both MCA clients, would pull out. Martin got the job, and Randall's film career never took off. Most stars judged it wise to sign with MCA; most studios did what they were told.

Hollywood's strong unions aided rather than abetted MCA. Its founder, Jules Stein, had cultivated Sidney Korshak, a lawyer from Chicago who was investigated (though never indicted) for his links with organised crime. Mr Korshak, with whom Mr Wasserman was on good terms both as friend and businessman, had the ability to start or stop strikes with a telephone call; so MCA productions were rarely affected.

Whereas Hollywood turned its nose up at television, MCA saw its potential. Mr Wasserman wanted the agency to expand into production; but the Screen Actors' Guild (SAG), the most powerful of the unions, had a rule against agencies moving into production. Fortunately, though, the president of the SAG was a friendly MCA client, Ronald Reagan, who in 1952 negotiated a waiver from the rule for MCA and MCA alone. It was this crucial waiver that allowed MCA's expansion through the whole of the movie business, and yet, testifying to a federal grand jury after a Justice Department investigation ten years later, Mr Reagan had little memory of it. “The only thing he knew was his name,” said one of the jurors of Mr Reagan, “so we didn't get too much out of him. I just know the whole thing smelled, but there was nothing definite you could put your finger on.” MCA had to divest itself of the agency business, but with Mr Wasserman's contacts, MCA as a studio held on to much of its power.

MCA's contacts with the mob were subsequently investigated by the Justice Department's Organised Crime Strike Force in Los Angeles. The doggedness of the government lawyers is film-script material, but life delivered a dark ending of the sort that modern Hollywood no longer admits: the investigation was dropped after the former boss of the Justice Department's organised crime division joined the law firm of one of MCA's board members, and the Justice Department lawyer was fired.

MCA's grip on Hollywood did eventually begin to slip, but it was Mr Wasserman more than the government who was to blame. The most powerful man in Hollywood, it turned out, was no good at making movies, and MCA turned out dog after dog.

Still, MCA sank slowly enough for Mr Wasserman and the other shareholders to sell it in 1990 to Matsushita, a Japanese firm full of excitement about the new idea of “synergy” between hardware and software in the entertainment business. Mr Wasserman saw plenty of synergy between Matsushita's cash and his and other shareholders' bank accounts, and extracted far more money from it than the studio was worth.

Matsushita limped away in 1994, and sold MCA on to Seagram, a Canadian drinks company run by Edgar Bronfman, a besuited businessman who brought in management consultants to clean the place up. His bootlegging ancestors would have had much in common with the founders of MCA. One of the delicious pieces of documentation with which this book is rich is from evidence given in the 1950s to Estes Kefauver, a senator chairing a committee investigating organised crime, by James “Niggy” Rutkin, a business partner of the Bronfman clan.

“Tell us about the Bronfmans. I have been very much interested in them.”

“Well, the Bronfmans are four brothers from Montreal, Canada. They own little hotels up there. Now, if you want to find out more about the hotels, you can ask the Canadian Mounted Police, and they will tell you about the little hotels, and you can use your imagination.”

“Is it like certain types of tourist camps down South? Is that the kind of hotels they are?”

“Well, I don't know how they are there. But only from what I read of hotels, the people sleep very fast. They rent them quite a few times a night.”